No exemptions from Medical Qualifying Exam — UKM

BorneoPost KUCHING: The Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) Medical Centre will not exempt graduates from unrecognised universities from sitting for the Medical Qualifying Examination (MQE) no matter what their grouses are.
Faculty of Medicine dean and UKM Medical Centre director Professor Datuk Dr Raymond Azman Ali said this in a press statement in response to three Shanghai Jiaotong University medical graduates who requested the authorities exempt them from taking the MQE so that they could be attached to a hospital in Sarawak or elsewhere in Malaysia.
The three graduates – John Hii, Steven Wong and Kong Ing Hui – had claimed during a press conference on April 2 that they failed the MQE because the exam was conducted unfairly and several UKM Hospital lecturers had treated them badly and used different teaching methodologies.
They also complained that the hospital treated them like final year medical students although they had medical degrees from China.
In response Dr Raymond said: “Our hospital has a Quality Department, within which there is a Clinical Practice Guidelines committee. Each department has its set of protocols of guidelines which guides the clinical practice of every member of staff in our hospital.
“As in any hospital elsewhere, where medical practice is concerned, there are often different schools of thought with regard to clinical management.”
Dr Raymond pointed out that UKM has been examining medical graduates from unrecognised university for many years.
“In last year’s examination, 14 out of 55 candidates of the medical graduates from unrecognised universities made the mark and we passed them,” he said.
He quoted several examples of gross incompetence amongst medical graduates from unrecognised universities, who had sat for the examination in the past and failed.
Referring to Hii, Wong and Kong, Dr Raymond said they were scheduled to sit the same examination taken by the university’s final year undergraduates.
Therefore, he said, it was only right they be treated as final year medical students and not as doctors.
“Not being treated as doctors is certainly not a reason for them to fail, since all medical undergraduates are not treated as doctors until they pass and obtain their practising certificates,” he pointed out.
All medical graduates scheduled for the MQE are taught for six weeks according to a structured schedule of bedside teaching in all the relevant departments, he said.
Within each department, a timetable is set for lecturers to take the medical graduates for clinical teaching sessions.
If this was not carried out, he said, the medical graduates could always complain to the Secretariat for Undergraduate Studies or even the deputy dean in charge.
With regards to the examination, Dr Raymond said medical graduates from unrecognised universities always sit for the examination together with UKM’s medical students to eliminate bias.
To say “lecturers were unwilling to teach them” without quoting specific circumstances was unfair, he said, as there may be lecturers who were not scheduled to teach them at that particular time, or were busy with other teaching, service, research or administrative activities at the time when asked by the medical graduates to teach.
“Each lecturer has his or her own schedule or timetable. Each of them comes from different education backgrounds with variations in the way they were taught before, but the basic essentials of what they teach are the same,” he said.
If graduates were looking for simple straightforward answers in written hospital protocols to the various clinical scenarios that they encounter, more often than not they will not be able to find it, just as they will seldom find straightforward answers in textbooks to real life situations, he said.